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Hackerspaces

From Hack Story

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Definition

Hackerspaces are self-organised and self-managed community workshops where hackers come together to socialise, exchange and proliferate free knowledge, and work on projects individually or in collaboration with others. The difference between hacklabs and hackerspaces is that the former are explicitly political project while the latter are explicitly technological projects. There are many anarchist activists, dangerous discussions and practical projects in the hackerspaces which are political, but the project itself does not have an explicit political mission.

History

Hackerspaces existed since a long time but they started to proliferate exponentially and become a strong movement following a talk in 2006 about hackerspace design patterns. Soon, the Hackerspaces website was created as a collaboration and networking platform. Until 2013 around 1000 new hackerspaces has been registered, which is a significant growth.

This timeline means that hackerspaces are a second wave of hacker social places, following the popularity of hacklabs around the turn of the millenium.

The impact of hackerspaces on the wider society and the impact of that impact can be registered through the controversy that broke out around military funding of a hackerspaces space project (see the article by Mitch Altman below).

Technological focus

The interpretation of hacking in the context of the hackerspaces is technologically agnostic. While programming is still very popular, there are other areas where the activities of hackerspaces could expand due to the fact that they are physical spaces, so people can collaborate them physically.

Technologies and key words are listed roughly "in order of appearance":